Removing iTunes Artwork
TMO Quick Tip - Removing iTunes Artwork
by , 7:30 AM EST, March 31st, 2006
For some, iTunes art work is a great feature. For others, it's just taking up hard drive space. If you want to remove album cover artwork from tracks either because you need to clear up some extra drive space, or maybe because a particular album cover doesn't suit your fancy, you can delete the graphic files from iTunes with just a couple of mouse clicks. Here's how:
- While in iTunes, click the track that has the album art you want to remove.
- Type Command-I to open the track Get Info window.
- Click the Artwork tab.
- Click the album artwork image.
- Click the Delete button.
![]() Deleting album art in iTunes. |
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If you want to remove album artwork for several tracks, do this:
- For a group of tracks, click on the first track and Shift-Click on the last track. Alternately, you can click on an album name to select an entire album.
- Type Command-I to open the track Get Info window.
- Click the Yes button to confirm that you want to edit information for multiple tracks at once.
- Click the Artwork check box.
- Click the OK button.
![]() Check Artwork to clear the album art for multiple tracks. |
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This trick works for both the Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.
Observer Comments
Good trick for iPod owners, I guess, but I have to say that artwork makes Front Row much more fun to use!
I'd be hesitant to wipe it all out my artwork just to fit a few more songs on my iPod when I knew it would be gone forever. There's no way to undo this without fixing each album or song one by one!
Half of the time those scripts grab artwork from Amazon or Google. The images are often incorrect and are very poor quality. Sometimes you even get the starbursts that say 30% off. Apple artwork isn't much better. The labels should be required to supply a decent cover image at a slightly higher resolution -- not something overly jpeged. Space is inexpensive and I think covers are a great addition!
QuoteGuest wrote:
taking off the album art is much better. it frees up a lot more space and i can put way more music on than i could before!
yes but it looks alot better on a video ipod, i only have 100gb of hdd space and 80gb for my music,documents etc. would rather have a nice looking ipod screen with the album art then the boring one with just the text. that just my opinion tho.
I have a Classic 160GB that I only use for music. A cover may take 12kB. I prefer the artwork rather than the nondescript screen. But, thanks for the tips because I made mistakes initially and did not know how to delete them. iTunes still has some quirks, especially when trying to simultaneously delete a cover from all the tracks in an album. It is a shame that Apple does not offer detailed instructions for many of these features, which are not necessarily intuitive.
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